


Guardian Not-Quite Angels

by ClearBrightLight



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-06
Updated: 2019-09-06
Packaged: 2020-10-11 07:00:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20542007
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClearBrightLight/pseuds/ClearBrightLight
Summary: The End of the World had come and gone.  The trials of Heaven and Hell had been passed, or at least circumvented.  The last trace of champagne had been drunk.  But still Crowley worried.





	Guardian Not-Quite Angels

The End of the World had come and gone. The trials of Heaven and Hell had been passed, or at least circumvented. The last trace of champagne had been drunk.

  
“Will you come in for a nightcap?” Aziraphale asked as the car drew to a stop, but Crowley could feel him itching to get back into his restored bookshop, to take inventory and reassure himself that nothing irreplaceable had been overlooked when Adam rewrote the world in his own image.  
  
“No, thanks,” Crowley answered, giving in to a yawn that felt big enough to unhinge his jaw. “I’m beat. I think I’ll go home and sleep for a week. Or three.”  
  
“Mmm.” The angel looked momentarily uncomfortable, then smiled gently. “Pleasant dreams. Ah, that is to say – _do_ you dream?”  
  
“Yeah, now and then.”  
  
“Well, I wish you sweet ones, then. Good night, Crowley.”  
  
“Night, angel.”  
  
Aziraphale climbed out of the car and shut the door carefully, and turned away. Crowley watched him unlock the bookshop, wave a final farewell through the glass, and pull down the shades.  
  
The motor kicked back on, and the Bentley nosed its way back out into traffic and shot away up the street.  
  
Crowley watched it go.  
  
The car could find its own way home; after so many years, it knew the route and the traffic laws as well as its owner did, and followed the latter far more often when left to its own devices. Crowley felt a brief pang of worry at seeing it leave, so soon after he had seen it destroyed, but swallowed his doubts. He had more important things to worry about tonight.  
  
To be specific, more important people.  
  
To be scrupulously nice and accurate, one very important angel.  
  
Crowley’s recent foray into Heaven had left the demon more shaken than he cared to admit. Not from any sort of misplaced sense of nostalgia; being back there for the first time in centuries had not been as bittersweet as he had dreaded it might. All the best parts had changed, and the worst were still firmly in evidence. Crowley could finally say, with perfect certainty, that he didn’t miss it at all. It was surprisingly freeing.  
  
But the callous, casual cruelty of the mockery of a trial he had been given in Aziraphale’s stead left him with no illusions on the Host’s opinion of his friend: if they could do away with the rogue angel, they would, and damn the consequences.  
  
Crowley intended to make sure any Heavenly messengers would meet with the direst and most damned of consequences. Or, ideally, ensure that they never even got the chance to try.  
  
Suddenly, where there had been a man-shaped being lurking on the sidewalk, there was a snake-shaped one instead. A smallish one, thin enough to wriggle its way under the bookshop door, in the small space where the weather-stripping had worn away, and slip itself into the shadows beneath the tables piled high with dusty tomes.  
  
The inside of the bookshop was warm and filled with a golden glow, which emanated partly from the lamps and partly from its proprietor, who positively radiated joy as he walked through the shelves, touching favorite volumes with loving fingers and exclaiming over new finds. Crowley slithered under a table, curled up in the darkest corner he could find, and watched Aziraphale with unblinking eyes.  
  
The angel was in his element. _Enraptured_ was a word that sprang to mind, Crowley thought, watching Aziraphale compare titles one by one with the massive card catalogue he still stubbornly refused to replace with an electronic system. Crowley wished he could simply stay here and bask in the bliss emanating from his friend, but he had other work to do, so he shook off the feeling of warmth and extended his senses outwards from the shop, listening hard on every wavelength for the approach of any creature, human, celestial, or otherwise.  
  
Nothing happened, for a while.  
  
After a few hours, Crowley noticed that something had changed – not outside the shop, but within it. Aziraphale was distracted. He was too elegant to fidget, but he was no longer concentrating on his task; he picked up books and simply set them down again, frowning. He tapped the side of the card he had been holding for the last twenty minutes on the edge of a table, then picked up another book at random, and dropped it on a different pile.  
  
“I should just check,” Aziraphale muttered to himself at last, and strode over to the telephone on the desk. He hesitated, dialed a number, waited a minute, said, “Oh, er – yes, hello. It’s me. Aziraphale. Er. Are you – oh, never mind, I’m being silly, it’s nothing. Good night,” and replaced the receiver with a sigh. His fingertips tapped a brief nervous tattoo on the desk.  
  
“It’s probably fine.” Aziraphale turned away resolutely, but did not return to his task. Crowley watched him pace, still fingering the worn edge of the catalogue card absently.  
  
Angels were attuned to love; demons specialized in more negative emotions. Crowley felt his external thermometer for stress and anxiety rising steadily by degrees as Aziraphale made circuits around the bookshop, muttering to himself.  
  
“Should I go and make sure? Anything might have happened. Or it might be perfectly fine. I don’t know.” Aziraphale wrung his hands. “I don’t know. I’m going to go and see. It’ll be fine.” He turned on his heel and walked straight out of the shop.  
  
Crowley blinked, and scurried after him.

  
Aziraphale dashed up to the high street, hailed the first cab he saw, and climbed in hurriedly. Crowley quickly resumed his two-legged form, made the fainting human behind him forget what she had seen, and hailed a cab of his own. Then he got to do a thing that he had been wanting an excuse to do for a very, very long time: “Follow that car,” he hissed at the driver, pointing out the cab with the angel in the back, and they were off.  
  
Crowley sat on the edge of his seat, watching incredulously. Where the hell was Aziraphale going? What could be so important that it made him leave his precious books at – Crowley checked his watch – two o’clock in the bloody morning?  
  
He was so preoccupied with watching the cab in front of them, almost losing track of it twice, and watching every dark alley they passed, every overhanging roof, to make sure nothing was about to pounce, that it took him almost until he saw the parked Bentley to realize that Aziraphale had directed his cab to Crowley’s address.  
  
“Stop here,” Crowley barked at his own cabbie, threw some bills at him (“Wow! Ta very much, mate!” the cabbie spluttered delightedly, so he’d probably outrageously overpaid) and jumped out, sticking to the shadows.  
  
Aziraphale dithered on the sidewalk for a long moment before he hand-waved himself into the building, and stepped into the elevator.  
  
Crowley scrambled up the fire escape. He didn’t need a fire escape; demons were mostly fireproof. But it did make for a very convenient back entrance.  
  
He slid open the window of his study as he heard the front door of the flat click open, and froze. What now? Pretend he wasn’t there? Pretend he’d been there the whole time?  
  
“Crowley? It’s me. May I come in?” he heard Aziraphale call softly, and then the door closed and light footsteps padded through the living room into the kitchen, and then into the bedroom. “Are you here?”  
  
There was a long silence. Crowley felt a tidal wave of something _wrong_ hit him, his senses absolutely swamped with dread that was not his own, and realized that Aziraphale was very, very afraid. The bottom dropped out of his own stomach. Enough indecision. If the angel was in danger –  
  
Crowley slithered silently through the window. The floorboards did not dare creak under him as he stalked into the apartment. Aziraphale was standing in the doorway of the bedroom, frozen, radiating terror, but there was no one else in the room.  
  
“What are you doing here?”  
  
Aziraphale squeaked and spun around, a hand flying to his chest, and the sense of vicarious panic vanished.  
  
“Oh! My dear chap, there you are. You gave me such a fright.”  
  
“What are you doing here?” Crowley repeated, not angry, just perplexed.  
  
The angel stammered, a flush rising in his face, “I came to – well, I thought I should just – you didn’t answer your phone, you see, and I didn’t know if – well – “  
  
“You came to check up on me?”  
  
“Er. Yes.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“I was worried, you see. You told me you were going to sleep, but then I suddenly thought – we did something extraordinarily dangerous today. What if someone had tried to – what if Hell sent someone – and you were here, alone, with your guard down – “  
  
Crowley yanked off his sunglasses and ran a hand over his face. “You idiot.” He wasn’t sure which of them he was talking to.  
  
“And when you didn’t answer your phone, I thought perhaps – “  
  
“I didn’t pick up because I wasn’t here.”  
  
“Where were you?”  
  
“Hiding in your shop,” Crowley admitted, “watching you.”  
  
Aziraphale cocked his head. “What? Why?”  
  
“Same reason, actually.”  
  
They looked at each other, and both started to laugh, not because it was actually very funny, but because they were exhausted, and relieved, and more than a little embarrassed. They sobered quickly.  
  
“You know,” Crowley mused, “It can’t possibly hurt us if Heaven and Hell both know we’re working together, now. And two are safer together than one alone.”  
  
“I was thinking much the same thing myself.”  
  
“I’ve changed my mind, angel. I will take that nightcap after all. Care to join me?”  
  
“Thank you, yes. That sounds delightful.”

  
Crowley did sleep that night, in the end. When he woke, almost two weeks later, feeling very warm and decadent, Aziraphale was sitting in a comfortable armchair by the side of the bed that had definitely not been in the flat before. He held a book in his right hand, and Crowley’s hand in his left. Crowley stretched, flexing his fingers a little, and Aziraphale put down his book.  
  
_Enraptured,_ thought Crowley, looking up at his guardian angel, who smiled radiantly over the tops of his spectacles.  
  
“Good morning, my dear.”  
  
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

**Author's Note:**

> We won an award, so I'm resurrecting my account! And of course I had to do it with the book that inspired me to write my first-ever piece of fanfiction at the age of nine, the book that has been made into such an amazing new show that it's inspired me to start writing again.
> 
> If anyone is curious, the catalogue card that started the angel's worry-spiral: _The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Reptiles and Amphibians,_ first edition.


End file.
